The Effect of Welfare Payments on the Marriage and Fertility Behavior of Unwed Mothers: Results from a Twins Experiment

Jeffrey Grogger and Stephen Bronars ()

No 6047, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study one aspect of the link between welfare and unwed motherhood: the relationship between benefit levels and the time-to-first-marriage and time-to-next-birth among women whose first" child was born out of wedlock. We use twin births to generate effectively random variation in welfare benefits among mothers within a state, which allows us to control for unobservable characteristics of states that typically confound the relationship between welfare payments and behavior. The twins approach yields evidence that higher base levels of welfare benefits: (1) lead initially unwed white mothers to forestall their eventual marriage; and (2) lead initially unwed black mothers to hasten their next birth. The magnitudes of these effects are small, however. Moreover, we find no evidence that the incremental benefit paid upon the birth of an additional child affects fertility.

JEL-codes: I3 J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997-05
Note: LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Grogger, Jeff and Stephen G. Bronars. "The Effect Of Welfare Payments On The Marriage And Fertility Behavior Of Unwed Mothers: Results From A Twins Experiment," Journal of Political Economy, 2001, v109(3,Jun), 529-545.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w6047.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:6047

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w6047

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().